More than 90% of music acts represented on Facebook, YouTube and other online hubs were classified as “undiscovered” in a new study by Next Big Sound, a company which analyzes the online popularity of musicians. Of the more than 1 million acts the company tracks, about 80% accumulated less than 1 “like” on Facebook per day. By comparison, Shakira racked up an average 50,000 likes on Facebook each day last year.

Still, the dominance of a relative handful of acts doesn’t diminish the fact that the web has given musicians infinite shelf space and carte blanche to market themselves in creative ways. “That’s the silver lining in the very dismal cloud that often hangs over the music industry,” says Liv Buli, a journalist at Next Big Sound who compiled the industry report. Founded in 2009, the company supplies musicians, managers and record labels with a digital dashboard to track the online reach of individual artists.

In a year when sales of digital downloads fell for the first time since the iTunes store opened in 2003, Next Big Sound also noted the consumer shift to streaming music. The company says there were 223 billion music streams in 2013, up from 93 billion online plays tracked the year before. (Spotify accounted for some of that jump, because Next Big Sound didn’t gather data from the streaming service in 2012.)

There was some diversity among the networks the company monitors. The year’s most popular acts on Vevo (topped by Rihanna, One Direction and Justin Bieber) mirrored the mainstream tastes of the video site’s users, while Soundcloud’s top acts (Skrillex, Caked Up, Major Lazer) skewed toward electronic music. Katy Perry added the most new followers on Twitter in 2013 (18.3 million), but Miley Cyrus had the most new fans on Instagram (7.4 million).

Even if a relative handful of artists truly dominate these networks, unlike the old world of radio and TV, that doesn’t block new talent from getting discovered. Next Big Sound’s tally of the most popular musicians on YouTube include acts who built their followings almost entirely on the site, including Boyce Avenue (344 million views in 2013) and Lindsey Stirling (307 million).

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